Knowing Where He Came From

Companion pieces: Is There No Hesed in John? and Jesus as Leader.

On 22 October 2015 I was flying to a meeting with a team of commercial lawyers. The subject was a foundation for the children of prisoners — whether there was a way to build one, and what it would take. I had a notebook open on the tray table and I was reading John 13.

Verse 3 is the one that stopped me.

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper.

Take verse 3 out and the story is still there. He gets up from the meal, he takes off his outer garments, he ties a towel round himself, he pours water into a basin and he washes their feet. Nothing is lost. The scene runs perfectly well without a sentence about what he knew.

Except that it is not a sentence. There is no verb in it that can stand on its own. The Greek begins with a participle — knowing — and a participle has to lean on something. It leans forward, past the end of the verse, and lands on the first real verb in the passage, which is in verse 4: he rose. The knowing and the getting up are one movement. John has built it so that you cannot have the second without the first.

So the story would survive without verse 3. The sentence would not. The rising would have nothing under it.

Although he knew that the Father had given all things into his hands — although he knew where he had come from and where he was going — he got up and washed their feet anyway. That is how I was taught it. Humility in spite of greatness. The higher you are, the further down you have to stoop, and the stooping is impressive in proportion to the height.

But the Greek does not require that, and the passage does not read that way. It reads because. He knew who he was, and that is why he could get up. John uses that construction three other times, and every time the knowing is the reason for what follows. Two verses earlier, knowing his hour had come, he loved them to the end.

The difference is not a fine point. On the first reading, knowing who you are is the obstacle that humility has to overcome. On the second, it is the thing that makes service possible at all. A man who is not sure what he is worth cannot wash anyone’s feet. He can perform the action, but he will need something back for it — a thank you, a story to tell, some evidence that he is still what he thought he was. Jesus needs nothing back from these twelve men. One of them has already been paid to hand him over, and his feet go in the water with everyone else’s.

Three things, and John lists them in order.

The Father had given all things into his hands. He had come from God. He was going back to God.

What is mine. Where I came from. Where I am going.

Those are not three facts about Jesus. They are three questions, and every man answers them or fails to.

The Old Testament ends on the failure. The last thing Malachi says is that Elijah will come and turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers — and then the book stops, and the question is left standing there for four hundred years. Luke picks it up in the first chapter of his gospel and hands it to John the Baptist.

I have spent a long time in prisons. Most of the men I have sat with cannot answer any of the three.

What is mine — nothing that was given. Whatever they have, they took or earned or held onto, and it can be taken back.

Where I came from — a name they may not use, or a man they will not talk about, or a series of houses.

Where I am going — nobody has ever described it to them. There is no picture of an ending that is worth walking towards.

A man in that position is not unwilling to serve. He cannot afford to. He needs whoever is in front of him to tell him what he is, and a man who needs that from people will never kneel down in front of them.

Paul writes a letter from prison to a man called Philemon, about a slave who has run away from him. The slave is in prison too, with Paul. Somewhere in there Paul has led him to Christ, and now he is sending him home with a letter asking his owner to take him back as a brother.

I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment.

That is the word he uses. Not taught him, not helped him. Fathered him. And he did it in chains, with nothing to offer — no standing, no freedom, nothing he could do for the man.

The letter turns on the slave’s name. Onesimus means useful. Paul writes:

Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.

Paul had no rank in that cell. He had the three things in verse 3, and they were enough.

On the last day of 2014 I wrote that passage out in a notebook and underneath it, in capitals, a name.

I had been reading Philemon over the end of the year. What caught me was the sending back. Paul does not keep Onesimus. He has grown fond of him and says so, and he sends him home anyway — to the man he stole from, with a letter in his hand. A prisoner going back into the place he ran from, and going back useful.

That is the whole of prison work. Coming alongside a man, seeing something change, and sending him back to his children and his wife and his street as somebody they are better off having. I wrote down that the name for it was Onesimus, and underlined it, and wrote that it would be a good thing to be able to write an Onesimus letter for a man on release.

Reading it now, eleven years on, one thing is missing from the page and I did not notice at the time. It is all about outcome. Useless to useful, a man returned in better condition than he left. Nothing about what it would take to get him there, and nothing about what I would have to be.

Ten months later I was on the plane, and I had been reading Philemon again.

The lawyers were waiting at the other end. The question in front of us was structure — what kind of entity, what it could do, who it would answer to. Useful questions. The right ones to be asking on the way to that meeting.

What I wrote in the notebook instead was a list of what the men needed, and then a line under it.

Not a social worker. Not a case manager. A Father.

Notebook, 22 October 2015

I had spent years around every programme the system can run. None of them are worthless and most of them are better than nothing. But a programme cannot answer any of the three questions. It can tell a man what to do on Tuesday. It cannot tell him where he came from, or that anything is his, or where this is going.

And then, on the same page, the thing I had been reading the gospel for without knowing it. Jesus’ work while he was alive was introducing people to his Father. John 4, a woman who wanted to know the correct place to acknowledge God, turned into a woman worshipping the Father. John 14 to 17, the whole long night of it, the God of the old covenant recast as the Father of the new. And Paul, in a cell, doing the same thing in one letter about one runaway slave.

So I prayed for the thing I thought I needed, and I can still read it.

Lord give me an authority as a father to these men.

I underlined an authority at the time, which tells me I knew it was the odd word in the sentence. It is not authority over anyone. Nobody needs more of that in a prison. It is the thing verse 3 describes. Something handed to you for somebody else.

And then, further down the page, a correction I had already made to myself:

It’s not even that I should be the Father — because even Jesus wasn’t the Father — but pointed to him.

I am glad that is there, because eleven years later I would have told you the prayer was that I wanted to be a father to those men. It says something better than that. The whole of the fathering, if there is any, is pointing at somebody else. Jesus spent three years doing it and never once stood in the place of the one he was pointing to.

I was crying by then, on a plane, with people either side of me.

I sat there ashamed of it, and the shame is what I want to put down here, because it took me years to see what was in it.

The day before I had been brought low by my own failure. Something I had not managed, again, that I had told myself I had finished with. Nobody saw it. It was between God and me, and I had taken it — I had even, in some way I do not like admitting, been ready for it. That kind of being brought low costs nothing in front of anybody. It leaves you exactly where you were.

And here I was on an aeroplane, unable to hold my face together because God had shown me something about men in prison and their children, and what I felt was not gratitude. It was embarrassment. I wanted the seat next to me to be empty.

I could take the humiliation nobody saw. I could not take the one that was visible, and the visible one was the one that was about love.

That is what I wrote: what a warped sense of values and selfishness.

The washing is not done privately. He takes his clothes off in front of twelve men and kneels on the floor where all of them can watch, including the one who had already taken money to hand him over.

I had asked, on the same page, to be given something so that those men might have a father. I meant it. And I could not manage to be seen weeping about them at thirty thousand feet.

I’m not very good at being a Father.

I wrote that too.

He knew what was his, and where he had come from, and where he was going. Then he got up from the table.

I still cannot answer the three the way he did. Most days I could not tell you where this is going. But the order matters. Not: be humble and the knowing will come. Rather: know whose you are, and then you will be able to kneel down without needing anything back for it.

The men I sit with cannot answer one of the three, and no programme I have ever seen can give them an answer. Somebody has to. Somebody who is not the Father, and is only pointing.

Onesimus went home with a letter in his hand.